Artist turns building into giant, playable Rubik's Cube

The facade of the Ars Electronica center in Linz, Austria, a hub for the electronic arts, is covered by 1,085 glass panes that can be lit by 95,000 color-changing LEDs. Artists can use it to create interactive artworks, such as the Wave Simulation controlled by a Wii Fit board and Wii controller or Cerebra Electronica experiment, which allowed participants to see their brain activity visualized.

Javier Lloret is the latest artist to get his hands on the facade, and he's turned it into a game.

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Puzzle Facade -- part of Lloret's thesis for the Interface Culture master program at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz -- uses a blank white 3D-printed Rubik's Cube as the controller for the changing lights of the facade. Its electronic components keep track of the cube's orientations and rotations, sending this data to the computer that runs the Puzzle Facade software via Bluetooth. The software then changes the lights on the building's facade.

"Due to the nature of this building and its surroundings, the player is only able to see two sides at the same time," Lloret wrote on his Web site. "This factor increases the difficulty of solving the puzzle, but as the player is able to rotate and flip the interface-cube, it is not a blocking factor."

You can watch the project's construction and execution in the video below.